A problem in the art of training a receiver that a) receives signals from a channel that introduces noise and intersymbol interference and b) which uses the least mean squares (LMS) algorithm, is that the high speed of computation required to perform the LMS algorithm limits the transmission rate for data. Therefore, the prior art uses a small step size so that the computation is approximately the same as if the elements of the training sequence were orthogonal. However, this approach leads to a coarser channel estimate, and the training takes longer than is desirable due to the small step size.